Pan-Amazon Synod Was a Done Deal 5 Years Ago

National Catholic Register, 27 October 2019

At a certain point, a pattern becomes clear — only those who wish to close their eyes do not see it.

Married priests — and perhaps women deacons — are on the way. The Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazon Region comes to a conclusion, with the participants voting on the final report on Saturday.

How and when the Church in the Amazon (and elsewhere?) will get there will be left deliberately ambiguous, but the end of the synod has been clearly in sight from those who were privileged to see it as long as five years ago.

In 2014, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes — the Brazilian whom Pope Francis chose to stand at his side when he appeared on the balcony of St. Peter’s after his election — founded the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM), which has been the lead agency in the preparations for the Amazon synod and responsible for many of the extra-synodal activities this past month in Rome, including the infamous indigenous fertility symbols now dissolving in the fetid waters of the Tiber.

Cardinal Hummes has been advocating the ordination of married men for more than 10 years. Pope Benedict XVI appointed him prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy in 2006, but shut down the married-priests question immediately.

Pope Francis opened it back up. After the twin synods on the family in 2014 and 2015, the Holy Father suggested that the next ordinary synod in 2018 be devoted to the priesthood, where the question of celibacy could be raised. The synod council — elected by the bishops at the 2015 synod — voted that combustible topic down, and so youth and vocations were chosen instead for last year’s synod.

Then in 2017, Pope Francis announced the Amazonian synod, a “special assembly” that did not require any synod council approval and whose members would be entirely chosen by the Holy Father. In an ordinary synod, bishops’ conferences from around the world vote on who will represent them. The Amazon synod is made up only of those who the Holy See invites, and Pope Francis put Cardinal Hummes in charge of the entire preparatory process and the synod itself. With Cardinal Hummes and REPAM in charge, the outcome was never in doubt.

Which does not mean that the synod participants themselves will vote for married “elders” in the remote regions of the Amazon on Saturday. They likely will, but they don’t need to.

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